human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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SECOND

Thursday, June 23, 2022 7:26 PM

Wall Street Journal asked the question: What is the Cost to Reduce Global Warming?
$131 Trillion spent between 2021 until 2050 Is One Answer.

If you look over the costs for next 30 years, and divide $131 trillion by 30 then round that number up to $5 trillion per year. Funny thing about that number because governments around the world spent $5.9 trillion subsidizing fossil fuels in 2020. Maybe governments should NOT subsidize fossil fuels, but rather subsidize reducing global warming? It would be cheaper, but then gasoline would get more expensive. More expensive is the only way, other than making gasoline engines illegal, to reduce the burning of gasoline.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-sub
sidies-in-2020-report-finds

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

SECOND

Friday, July 8, 2022 11:59 PM

Start-up NET Power has developed technology that differs from traditional power stations. It burns natural gas with oxygen instead of air and drives a turbine with high pressure carbon dioxide instead of steam. The additional CO2 is captured for storage.

NET Power recently connected a 50MW demonstration plant to the Texas electricity grid. If its emissions were to be permanently sequestered, the plant might have a carbon footprint no bigger than a solar farm.

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/06/zero-emissions-natural-ga
s-may-be-possible/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

SIGNYM

Saturday, July 9, 2022 12:53 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Start-up NET Power has developed technology that differs from traditional power stations. It burns natural gas with oxygen instead of air and drives a turbine with high pressure carbon dioxide instead of steam. The additional CO2 is captured for storage.

NET Power recently connected a 50MW demonstration plant to the Texas electricity grid. If its emissions were to be permanently sequestered, the plant might have a carbon footprint no bigger than a solar farm.

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/06/zero-emissions-natural-ga
s-may-be-possible/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Sounds interesting. I'll have to look up the technical details bc I have quite a few questions!

Driving a turbine with high-pressure CO2 has got to be step 5 of a series of power-extraction steps. Clearly, burning natgas with O2 generates a huge amount of heat, especially since there's no N2 to dilute the heat, so there has got to be a traditional turbine as part of electrical generation. That can be made more efficient by using "waste heat"" to run either a traditional boiler-type steam turbine, or a Stirling engine.

Also, concentrating CO2 and O2 are energy-intensive steps.

CO2 can be chemically captured using one of the ethanolamines and released for re-use with heat, BUT water has to be dropped out first, bc burning natgas produces a prodigious amt of water, and running steamy exhaust thru ethanolamine will dilute it. I imagine some sort of heat-exchanger system where they use waste heart to regenerate the ethanolamine and at the same time cool the exhaust to drop water out

O2 OTOH is most efficiently captured, as far as I know,with pressure-swing absorption, which, of course, requires energy

And finally- complete capture of exhaust gases would reduce the carbon footprint of ANY generating station.

So the energetics would really have to be tuned for maximal efficiency.

I once calculated the energy savings of electric vehicles v gasoline - powered vehicles, attempting to find which has better CO2-per-mile performance.

It was actually pretty equivocal, and if coal is used to generate the electricity people driving electric cars are, in essence, driving coal-powered vehicles. But assuming electricity is generated with oil or natgas, electric vehicles are only a marginal improvement, if any (depending on turbine, grid and charging efficiency.)

Same issue with solar cells. While actual generation of electricity is clean and silent, only in the last 10 years or so have solar panels passed the "breakeven" point where they generate more energy, over their lifetime, than it took to produce them.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Saturday, July 9, 2022 1:42 AM

I think the greatest potential savings have to do with

farming and forestry practices which sequester carbon

reducing war (not just the fuel required to move weaponry around but the energy required for production)

improving women's standard of living and education ("demographic transition")

land use planning (reduce the requirement for autos)

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Tuesday, July 19, 2022 6:43 AM

Why the US is so horribly incapable of meaningful climate action?

Updated 5:26 PM ET, Mon July 18, 2022

While the world's climate is hot and getting hotter, the US government is frozen in time.

Runways are melting in the UK. Lakes are drying up in the US. Fires are raging all over.

But the federal government is stuck in amber, blocked by a Supreme Court that pines for a pre-industrial age, insisting on new laws for the Environmental Protection Agency to fight climate change, and beholden to a custom in the Senate that makes any new climate law all but impossible.

One Democratic senator -- Joe Manchin, from the coal-producing state of West Virginia and the 50th Democratic Senator -- held the power to bless or destroy some climate action this year. He chose destruction. All 50 Republican Senators joined with Manchin.

What's playing out in Europe right now is remarkably similar to what we saw last year in the Pacific Northwest -- a region that is used to cooler weather besieged by record-breaking heat. Hundreds of people died in the Northwest last summer, and we've already seen reports that more than 1,000 people died of heat-related illness in Spain and Portugal in the past several days.

Humans caused this. Scientists later found that the Northwest heat wave would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change. The same will be said for Europe's heat this week -- and specifically the all-time records in the UK. We just wouldn't be able to get these kinds of temperatures without global warming.

Don't expect anything large and meaningful from the US government.

The second part of this story has to do with the US government, which is witnessing a conservative Supreme Court wield more power to weaken the federal government.
Less power for the EPA. In June the conservatives who will control the court for decades denuded the EPA of its ability to, as CNN wrote, broadly regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants.

It also upended years of doctrine by which the federal government assumed authority to regulate everything from climate policy to worker safety.

Congress is dysfunctional. Busting the federal bureaucracy back to the Gilded Age might sound good in a legal seminar, as in demanding more guidance from Congress.
But the problem is that the growing tribalism of US politics means Congress cannot agree to do big things. Climate change, which scientists have long argued is ultimately an existential threat, is the biggest.

More at https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/18/politics/us-climate-change-inaction-wha
t-matters/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, July 19, 2022 6:47 AM

blah, blah, blah

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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

SECOND

Friday, July 22, 2022 4:02 AM

Every American should have a heat pump

The Post story doesn't really explain why heat pumps aren't more popular in the United States:

Estimates show that 90 percent of Japanese households use heat pumps to heat and cool homes, contributing to a 40 percent drop in the country’s electricity consumption over the past decade. In Italy, the government effectively pays citizens to use the technology; homeowners can get 110 percent of their heat pump cost reimbursed.

Scientists tout the devices as inexpensive, energy-efficient systems that significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions over traditional heating and cooling devices.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220721213930/https://www.washingtonpost.
com/technology/2022/07/21/europe-heat-wave-heat-pump/

The second type of heat pump is geothermal, and it's a practical option only when you're building a new house. It looks like this:

A geothermal heat pump takes advantage of the fact that once you dig down about six or seven feet, the temperature of the soil stays the same all year round, usually around 55° or so. In winter that's hot water that can be used to heat a house. In summer it's cold water that can be used to cool a house. That's super-efficient.

However, it also requires a whole bunch of piping to be installed underground, and that's a lot easier to do when a house is being built. Once the house is finished it's a lot harder to find the space to install the ground loops, though it's usually not impossible.

So this is a no-brainer. If you're building a house, it should include the piping for a geothermal heat pump. If you're replacing a central AC unit, it should be replaced with a heat pump.

More at https://jabberwocking.com/every-american-should-have-a-heat-pump/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, July 22, 2022 5:27 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Every American should have a heat pump

Nope.

But you go right on ahead and get yourself a heat pump.

Get a swamp cooler for the summer while you're at it.

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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

SIGNYM

Friday, July 22, 2022 5:55 AM

A couple I know had an "environmentally friendly" house built with ground_sourced heating/cooling and it cost a fortune bc they had to sink a heat exchanger into the ground (all of that environmentally unfriendly copper tubing!) filled with (environmentally unfriendly) glycol ethers and more (environmentally unfriendly) tubing for underfloor heating.

AFA electric-powered heat pumps: if your locality generates it's electricity from coal, what you have is a coal-fired heat pump. IF your locality generates electricity from natgas, you have to look at the efficiency of generating electricity and transmitting it to the user v the efficiency of generating heat by burning gas directly at the user's house. IIRC the efficiency of generating and xmitting electricity from nat gas to the user is about 50%. Even if you get twice as much heat out of a heat pump as you put in, you've basically doubled an efficiency that was previously cut in half. In other words, it's a wash.

Relative costs tell me that more material and expense goes into generating heat with a heat pump than generating heat directly from burning natgas. Someone should do a calculation taking into account all of the inefficicies of heat pumps plus all of the environmental costs of building and maintaining a power grid versus the inefficicies and resource costs of maintaining a natgas distribution system.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, July 22, 2022 7:12 AM

This guy is great. He's also a HUGE supporter of heat pumps. (We don't have to agree on everything).

I trust this guy's judgement, and he goes into detail about the efficiency of heat pumps. According to him, it is far more efficient using these than our traditional gas heaters.

But they are prone to a LOT of problems that will literally leave you out in the cold when they occur at the worst possible time. That might be just fine in Texas where they almost never have to even use a furnace, but up in Indiana it could mean life or death for a lot of people.

Look into the weird programs that the UK is implementing with these things too... They'll give you huge credits for dismantling your natural gas setup and having a heat pump installed, but part of the fine print is that you CAN NOT go back to natural gas if you take advantage of this program.

Why should they have to write that legalese in there if these things are so good, and why would anyone knowingly agree to those terms?

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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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